Fear of Failure

[favouredenemy]

It is the mission of each true knight...
His duty... nay, his privilege!
To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe...
 - Don Quixote

Comments

Re: My 87p's worth...

[favouredenemy]

Glad you enjoyed reading

[chess]

I think there are both system and social design features that you can use to reduce fear of failure.

As raggedhalo says, one of those is to tell people up front about your risk model; but another is to get them used to character death early (c.f. DUTT's somewhat controversial tradition of having a first linear which is designed to have a high death rate for newbies so they get used to losing characters

[tamerterra]

"Providing plot hooks for new characters / a setting where it's very easy for a new adventurer to show up and already have sufficient setting hooks to be accepted as a valuable member of the party also helps - if you reduce that awkward period of not knowing anyone and not having enough reputation and shinies to get invited to the big girls' table, character death again hurts less."

Quoted for truth. I've had so many characters (in various systems) that pretty much ran in with some plot, fought with all that they had, and died in the process/shortly afterwards- and I think those were the most fun ones. But at the same time, there was a lot of peer pressure to stop making characters which were set up to make 'stupid' decisions during Shatleg- where 'stupid decisions' means 'taking on (apparently) disproportionate risk to attempt something that only my character cared about'.

[chess]

Yes - the fear of failure thing is really interesting.

Eidolons in Maelstrom are possibly the best example of this - you literally couldn't lose the character unless you tried really hard, so naturally that would make people less risk averse, right?

Wrong - because an eidolon's skill list basically was 'your reputation - and that's it', (and on an IC level - you lived forever - so if you epically screwed up in front of your peers, the resulting mockery could potentially persist forever too!) eidolons were some of the most insanely risk-averse characters out there...

[ebonclad]

How to explain my response to this... hmm

[ebonclad]

Not only is "heroism" a term open to personal interpretation, but if you can't even agree on exactly what the term means, it seems a bit iffy to try to assert that preserving it is important to the proper working of the system. For me, it's heroic enough that the PCs willingly put themselves into potentially deadly danger each week, which applies to basically every adventuring LARP. When a character decides to leave play for good, that's the threshold of cowardice that makes the most difference, and even then it just means they're replaced by another character who is, by default, less so for choosing to stay

[ebonclad]

*thinks* Or maybe I am just really too much of a nervous coward through and through to really belong in a "heroic" system. Hmm.

[clericalkender]

^ This. For a lot of people, the fun in larp comes from being able to really fall into an IC mindset, and that means playing a character they can believe in as a real person with real flaws and real fears. Because no one loves Aragorn as much as they love Sam (unless they're completely heartless), and a story about someone who's worried and scared and heartbroken when everything goes wrong is so much more interesting than one about a headstrong moron who takes victory or failure in his stride and carries on, unchanged by his experiences

[davine_wrath]

Arkady was never intended to be a hero - more a bimbling ineffective mage in over his head with the task of saving the world - but he was one of the good guys. That he learned a lot of stuff and became really powerful was mitigated by that starting mindset, and in later years definitely shaped by increasing paranoia, madness and the 'need to stay alive because I'm really important to the whole saving the world thing